A practicum provided 10th- grade students in 2 English honors classes with direct instruction in sentence combining. The goal of the program was to increase the syntactic complexity of student writing, to have students express more in each sentence. Instruction was approached from different aspects. The students worked with two textbooks on sentence combining. They worked with sentences from the newspaper and a magazine. There were lessons in sentence combining as a means to understanding the style of the two textbook authors. Sentence combining was used as a means to encourage substantial revision of essays. Writing an abstract of the research paper was approached through sentence combining. Exercises utilizing different levels of thinking were also included. According to a pretest and posttest measured by T-unit length, students progressed an average of four years during a 10-week period. The attitudes of the students toward writing generally improved. (Sixteen references and a bibliography are attached. Appendixes include: a letter from the language arts supervisor, a "T.V. Guide" exercise, an essay on sentence combining strategies keyed to Bloom's learning behaviors, a pretest and posttest, and test results.) (Author/MG)